(CNN)At least a dozen tourists on two cruises that visited the Tunisian capital, Tunis, are among more than 20 people who were gunned down this week at the country’s Bardo National Museum, officials said.

Details of the victims in Wednesday’s attack have been slow to emerge. Some of the bodies remained unidentified at a morgue, a forensic official said Friday.

(CNN) The Sunni terror group ISIS purportedly claimed it committed Friday’s bombings that killed scores of people at two mosques frequented by Shiite rebels in Yemen’s capital — an attack that would mark ISIS’s first large-scale attack in the Arabian Peninsula country.

At least 137 people were killed and 357 wounded when suicide bombers, pretending to be disabled and hiding explosives under casts, attacked the mosques in Sanaa, according to Yemen’s state-run Saba news agency.

A one-time al Qaeda chieftain and aide of Osama bin Laden was found guilty Thursday of conspiring to kill Americans in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa.

Khaled al-Fawwaz was convicted on four counts of conspiracy by an anonymous Manhattan federal court jury for his role in the attacks that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

He led an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and later served as bin Laden’s spokesman in London.

Wearing a white cloak and skullcap, al-Fawwaz was expressionless as the forewoman announced the verdict.

Before being led out of the courtroom, he smiled at his lawyer.

Judge Lewis Kaplan praised the jury following the verdict.

“All persons of this country owe you a debt of gratitude,” he said, calling the case “hard fought” and adding, “There is no doubt the defendant has received a fair trial.”

In a statement following the verdict, US Attorney Preet Bharara said, “As a unanimous jury has found, for nearly a decade, Khaled al-Fawwaz played a critical role for al Qaeda in its murderous conspiracy against America.”

Al-Fawwaz’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim said outside the courtroom that she was “disappointed.”

“Trying a pre-9/11 terrorism case in a post-9/11 era within blocks from the World Trade Center ensured that Mr. al-Fawwaz could never receive a truly fair trial by a truly impartial jury.”

Al-Fawwaz “operated at the very heart of this conspiracy,” Assistant US Attorney Sean Buckley said in his closing argument.

The trial also showcased al Qaeda in its infancy, when its members numbered in the hundreds and it plotted terrorist attacks that eventually drew the attention of criminal investigators a world away.

Witnesses included an American former al Qaeda member who said bin Laden asked him in 1995 to kill Egypt’s president by ramming the president’s plane with bin Laden’s in midair. The New York Police Department’s counterterrorism and intelligence chief, John Miller, testified about meeting al-Fawwaz in London in 1998, when Miller was a TV news correspondent.

An al Qaeda roster of original members lists bin Laden first and al-Fawwaz ninth, and 18 copies of bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war — signed by bin Laden — were found in al-Fawwaz’s London apartment, prosecutors said. US special forces found the roster in an al Qaeda leader’s home after the Sept. 11 attacks, the government said.

Al-Fawwaz made sure bin Laden’s declaration of war reached the world by communicating with the media and helping translate bin Laden’s words for multiple audiences, prosecutors said.

Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri — an admitted Al Qaeda operative in the United States — was released last week from a federal prison prior to completing his 15-year sentence because of “time served,” the Justice Department told Fox News on Tuesday.

Al Marri had been in U.S. custody since 2001, after reportedly being picked up on a routine traffic stop just weeks after the 9-11 terror attacks. During a routine check, police discovered federal authorities already had him on their radar.

He was arrested and charged with providing “material support or resources” to 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda operatives.

The 49-year-old al Marri, a Qatar native, at the time of his arrest was a U.S. resident attending graduate school.

He was declared an enemy combatant in 2003 and sent to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.

In 2008, U.S. courts ruled that al Marri, as a U.S. resident, was entitled to a federal hearing. He accepted a plea deal in 2009 that included the 15-year sentence, reportedly at a federal prison in Illinois.

Al Marri was freed on Friday, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

His departure follows a series of releases of detainees from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as President Obama tries to close the facility, opened in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.

The recent Guantanamo releases have drawn sharp reaction from critics who say the president is now freeing the last and most dangerous detainees, who pose a high risk of re-establishing terror group connections.

Al Marri reportedly has returned to Qatar as part of a repatriation agreement.

The country last year accepted five Guantanamo Bay detainees, released in exchange for the Taliban’s release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

As part of the deal, the Qatar government imposed a one-year travel ban on the detainees and pledged they would pose no further threat to the U.S.

According to the terms of al Marri’s 2009 deal, he admitted to conspiring to “provide material support or resources” to Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives.

“The defendant will plead guilty because he is in fact guilty,” federal prosecutors said in the court documents.

Congressman Andre Carson found himself in strange company Saturday evening when he was scheduled to be featured on a panel with a known Al-Qaeda webmaster and Taliban fundraiser, Mazen Mokhtar, during the just-concluded 2014 Muslim American Society/Islamic Circle of North America (MAS/ICNA) 2014 convention held in Chicago.

The panel was titled “Ferguson is our issue: We Can’t Breath.”

One attendee tweeted that the joint Carson/Mokhtar panelwas the “most important session” of the convention:

Meanwhile, a New Jersey man is under investigation for having helped a British computer specialist, also arrested in London this week, allegedly solicit funds for a terrorist group by creating and operating an exact replica of the British man’s Web site.

Mazen Mokhtar, an Egyptian-born imam and political activist, operated a Web site identified in an affidavit unsealed Friday by the U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut. The Web site solicited funds for the Taliban and Chechen mujaheddin, according to the affidavit. It is an exact replica of Web sites operated by Babar Ahmad, who was arrested in England on a U.S. extradition warrant this week.

The affidavit said the New Jersey home of the mirror Web site operator, identified on a Web site as Mokhtar, was searched in the recent past and that copies of Azzam Publications sites, operated by Ahmad, were found on Mokhtar’s computer’s hard drive and files.

Officials at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, which is leading the investigation, declined yesterday to comment on Mokhtar or the New Jersey investigation.

And prayers and peace to the prophet, who was sent with sword to spread mercy to all, and his family and companions and who walked his path till the Day of Judgment.

The crimes committed by the U.S. in the Islamic world in decades starting with its crimes in Palestine thought the unlimited support to the Zionist occupiers, and its military support for the brutal attacks on the Muslim people in Gaza, through its crimes and massacres in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq.

And what US is doing today, led by the criminal Obama, through a crusade against Muslims which mainly depend on the airstrikes both in Iraq & the Levant or in Yemen, Somalia, Sinai and Waziristan, and his recent follies by repeating the US forces military operations, raids and landings among them the latest unsuccessful operation in Hadramout, in which a constellation of Mujahideen martyred (as we consider them) and as the U.S. continue bombing the Mujahideen through drones in addition to Obama’s intransigence in responding to demands by Mojahdeen at Qadet Al-Jihad.

Based on the above, we give the US government three days from the date of publication of this statement for the implementation of our demands, which are known to them very well. Otherwise, the American detainee will meet his inevitable fate, and we warn Obama and the US government against proceeding with any other follies.
“Allah will surely support those who support Him. Indeed, Allah is Powerful and Exalted in Might.”

Al-Qaeda Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula

My name is Luke Somers. I’m 33 years old. I was born in England, but I carry American citizenship and have lived in America for most of my life.

It’s now been well over a year since I’ve been kidnapped in Sana’a.

Basically, I’m looking for any help that can get me out of this situation. I’m certain that my life is in danger. So as I sit here now, I ask if anything can be done, please let it be done.

Thank you very much

Good luck Luke. Obama is too busy fanning the flames of racial divide and civil war in America and defending the Muslim Brotherhood. You are second fiddle, if not much lower.

There’s nothing graphic in the video but if it disappears try here or here.

(AFP) – The United States is preparing to release more than a dozen Guantanamo detainees as President Barack Obama works towards his long-promised goal of closing the controversial military prison, an US defense official said Wednesday.

The news comes the same day the Defense Department sent home one of two remaining detained Kuwaitis, bringing the total population at the jail on a US naval base in Cuba to 148.

Fawzi al-Odah, 37 — who spent nearly 13 years in US detention — took off in a Kuwaiti government plane at 5:30 am (1030 GMT), Lieutenant Colonel Myles Caggins told AFP.

He was headed to a rehabilitation center in his home country created for former Guantanamo detainees — one which 10 Kuwaitis have already passed through.

Al-Odah’s release leaves 79 Guantanamo inmates cleared for release — never charged or tried for any crime and who have been approved by a special committee to be freed.

But efforts to send them home or to third party countries have languished as Obama has been thwarted by domestic and international obstacles.

Al-Odah was the first inmate freed since late May, when five Taliban Guantanamo detainnes were swapped for US Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, a move that infuriated Republican lawmakers who protested they hadn’t been informed in advance.

The Obama administration said Wednesday it plans to speed up the releases in the coming months.

“The Department of Defense hopes to transfer more than a dozen detainees to countries in South America and Europe, in the next two months, through the winter,” a Pentagon official told AFP.

The official, who asked not to be named, said countries have agreed to take around 20 Guantanamo inmates, though the deals were not yet finalized.

Six are supposed to be sent to Uruguay, but their transfer has been blocked for political reasons there.

Meanwhile, the rocky situation in Yemen, the home country of many of the remaining detainees who have been cleared, means the Obama administration must find alternative destinations.

“Closing Guantanamo is a priority for the defense department,” Caggins told AFP.

“The Defense Department is working diligently to transfer the remaining detainees from Guantanamo,” he said, adding that the Pentagon will “notify Congress prior to any transfer in accordance with statutory requirements.”

Al-Odah was cleared by the Periodic Review Board at a hearing in July.

He had been arrested alongside fellow Kuwaiti Guantanamo detainee Fayez Al Kandari in northern Pakistan in late 2001, by tribesmen who sold them to the Pakistani army, who in turn handed them over to the United States.

The review board has recommended against releasing fellow Kuwaiti Al Kandari, ruling that he “almost certainly retains an extremist mindset and had close ties with high-level Al-Qaeda leaders in the past.”

Caggins said Al Odah’s “transfer took place consistent with appropriate security and humane treatment measures,” and in cooperation with the Kuwaiti government.

Recent media reports have suggested Obama was considering circumventing Congress, where he faces staunch opposition, to pave the way for shuttering the war-on-terror prison.

All this despite the fact that large numbers of Gitmo jihadists are returning to wage jihad with ISIS and other Muslim terror groups:

A federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday that he would accept a guilty plea from a terrorism defendant who would face a maximum 25-year prison sentence for charges stemming from Al Qaeda’s 1998 conspiracy to bomb two United States Embassies in East Africa.

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, had recently questioned the wisdom of a deal in which prosecutors allowed the defendant, Adel Abdul Bary, 54, to plead guilty to three counts that carried the maximum 25-year sentence.

Mr. Bary, who was arrested in Britain in 1999 and brought to the United States in 2012, could spend less time in prison if credited with the roughly 15 years he has already served, largely during his unsuccessful extradition battle.

In his ruling, Judge Kaplan said his initial concern was that 25 years “may be too lenient.” But he said prosecutors had suggested that their ability to win a conviction on the charges relating specifically to the embassy bombings — in which 224 people died — was uncertain, and the evidence was “not as strong” as evidence establishing Mr. Bary’s participation in a conspiracy to kill Americans, one of the counts to which he pleaded guilty.

The judge also wrote that if Mr. Bary received credit for the earlier prison time, he would serve until he was in his 60s. “By that time,” Judge Kaplan noted, “he will have spent a substantial amount of his adult life in prison.” He said the government’s decision “was a reasonable one.”

Prosecutors have said Mr. Bary once led the London cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group led by Ayman al-Zawahri, now the leader of Al Qaeda. They say Mr. Bary helped Osama bin Laden pass messages to the news media claiming responsibility for the bombings and containing future threats. He is to be sentenced on Jan. 12.